Quote of the day—Sheryl Nuxoll

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The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange. Several years from now, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies. The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will pull the trigger on the insurance companies.

Sheryl Nuxoll
Idaho state Senator
January 23, 2012
Idaho senator compares health exchange to Holocaust
[My resident medical insurance expert says, “Time will tell.”

The problem is similar to the Jews boarding the trains. Once you enter the camp it’s too late to change your mind about getting on the train. I wonder how many of them said, “Time will tell.”—Joe]

Anti-gunner’s playbook

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Via a Tweet from SAF I found Dave Workman’s article on the Gun Control Playbook.

Looking at the actual playbook there are some interesting things. This is particularly intriguing:

Advocates for gun violence prevention win the logical debate, but lose on more emotional terms.

This is followed by these “Key Messaging Principles”:

#1: ALWAYS FOCUS ON EMOTIONAL AND VALUE-DRIVEN
ARGUMENTS ABOUT GUN VIOLENCE, NOT THE POLITICAL
FOOD FIGHT IN WASHINGTON OR WONKY STATISTICS.

#2: TELL STORIES WITH IMAGES AND FEELINGS.

#3: CLAIM MORAL AUTHORITY AND THE MANTLE OF FREEDOM.

If they “win the logical debate” then why not play on that turf rather than engaging on the emotional battlefield?

Read the playbook. It’s conformation of the things we have been saying for years. They don’t have facts they have emotions. They literally believe that being a victim grants them moral authority:

Many of the most active advocates and voices in the gun violence prevention movement are people who have personally lived through a life-changing gun violence experience. That painful reality gives such spokespeople special moral authority.

If you or a loved one were raped does that give you the moral authority to demand all men be put in jail or neutered? If you or a loved one were destitute does that give you the moral authority to demand others give you their property? If you or a loved one were slandered or libeled does that give you the moral authority the demand “sensible laws to prevent slander and libel” which infringe upon the right to freedom of speech?

The answer is no. And to those that believe they have moral authority because they or a loved one were injured by someone with a gun the answer is also no.

What’s the problem?

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From the Seattle Police Department blog:

Security came out of nowhere,” he told officers, adding that all he did “was not pay for some items.”

I will concede that the perpetrator could just be criminally stupid. But nearly every time I walk down the streets of Seattle I’m amazed at the number of communists openly advocating their failed economics. I can’t walk more than a couple blocks without seeing someone selling “Real Change” (here is one socialist/communist editorial I found after about 30 seconds of looking).

Tonight as I was heading to my bus I crossed Pine Street on the east side of 3rd. There were a bunch of people chanting and holding signs in the middle of Pine street. The one sign I bothered to read was something about demanding a $15/hour minimum wage. I couldn’t understand all the words of the chant but it ended with “against the wall”. I don’t know for certain but it sounded like a threat to me. On the north side of Pine there were a bunch of police officers on bicycles. One was giving directions to the others and they broke into two groups and surrounded the chanting crowd. A few minutes later I received a couple Tweets from the Seattle PD:

I have to wonder; Is this what it was like in the early days before the communists took over in other countries? Even in the cities of Kirkland and Bellevue just a few miles to the east of Seattle openly advocating for communism is rare. On the east side of the state and on into Idaho it’s even more rare. Yet in downtown Seattle it’s so accepted that someone there acts as if there isn’t a problem with taking things from a store without paying for them.

We have a serious problem if the concept of private property is so alien that when these people get caught stealing their response is bewilderment and ask, “What’s the problem?”

Quote of the day—Claire Wolfe

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Sometimes it’s excruciating, listening to the rhetoric of gun grabbers. The combination of self-righteousness and sheer bloody ignorance is like fingernails on the blackboard of the mind.

Claire Wolfe
August 2013 issue of S.W.A.T. Magazine
[H/T to Tamara K. for the Tweet.

I take minor exception to this. If the gun grabbers were teenagers it would be cute to see and hear them act almost grown up but with a heaping dose of ignorance. As political servants charged with protecting, and having taken an oath to protect, our rights they are insubordinate. As mental cases they are sad examples of a mind lost to grief or inherent mental defect.

It’s only as adults without positions of power do they come across as blustering fools as Wolfe describes.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ry Jones

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I didn’t cross any tape, leave any roads, or drive around any gates, but there I was in the forbidden area…

I noticed on the map there was a road that would save me several hours on an already several hour detour, so I took it. Came to the back of a ROAD CLOSED DUE TO FIRE sign. I will admit I considered turning around several times due to the thick smoke, but I didn’t.

Ry Jones
July 29, 2013
In which I do an impossible thing twice in one day, and something I didn’t want to do twice in a weekend.
[Further discussion with Ry revealed what I suspected. Ry’s definition of “road” is not universally accepted. In this case it was “the trail marked with tape”.

His definition of “thick smoke” would find significant correlation with the criteria for special equipment required by professional firefighters.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John M. Snyder

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What we really need are policies that penalize politicians and managers who undermine the right and ability of law-abiding citizens to get, carry and use the guns and ammunition they need to protect the right to life itself from the madmen and criminals who burden our society.

John M. Snyder
July 25, 2012
Colorado Mass Murder Shows Need for Unencumbered Armed Citizenry
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Editing is tedious, part 2

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Over a month ago, I stopped posting daily installments of The Stars Came Back. I said it would be a week or two to finish and go live. Oops. About three weeks ago, I said it was going, but slowly – editing is tedious. The story is done, now. I’ve gone over it several more times, end to end, tweaking it here and there, but also fixing basic grammar and word selection goofs. And I’m still finding them. It’s amazing, really, how many basic things slipped by not only my first reading, but my second, the several wonderful volunteers that have sent me a lot of corrections and questions. I had a long conversation with Sean about some big picture things, some of which he had some great criticisms on, and some of which he had questions about, but the choices made were conscious decisions on my part because I was trying to do something specific with the story. And yet, there are still minor errors cropping up here and there. Cover art is being worked on. Paul very generously created some much nicer drawings of Tajemnica from my sketches. It will be a much better story for the effort being put into it now, but it will still be at least a few days, maybe a few weeks if I hire a professional editor to give it a good thrashing, er, I mean, a going over, but I hope the final product will be worth the wait.
In the mean time, I’m giving it a few days rest, so I can let my eyes uncross, and think about what stories I could write in the same universe. So far, my main ideas are Lag’s komenagen, Allonia’s past, further adventures of Taj in the future, or a series of stories about Tajemnica’s past adventures; the downside of the last one is that they’d tend to be downers at the end of each installment. (for example, how did she win a battle but lose her entire crew?) Going in a different direction, there are doing things like looking at the life of a terraforming platform crew on a new planet.

Chicago Confiscation

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On the civil-rights side, we keep saying that the there is a slippery slope that the anti-rights people want to push us down as fast as possible, and things like registration serve no purpose other than to confiscate. On the other side, the anti-rights bigots keeps calling us paranoid, saying that it’ll never happen, etc. Except for when it does.

Chicago Firearms confiscation BeginsThose that have their FOID card lapse are making pols worry that their guns are not taken away that very moment. But, because of the change in IL law recently, the number of FOID applicants is up, WAY up, so waiting times after application for renewal are also way up.

It’s not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you. It’s simply recognition of reality. On the flip side, I think delusional is a term that can be applied to the antis.

Those who support the Second Amendment should be ashamed

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This is part of the reason we got to where we did:

Anti-rights Activist Judge Caught Abusing Authority in Court

Connecticut Carry Calls for Judge to Step Down

Vernon, CT, July 16, 2013:  Prominent firearms Attorney Rachel Baird of Torrington filed a motion to recuse and disqualify Judge Edward Mullarkey from a Rockville Superior Court GA-19 case on July 15th. The Motion for Recusal and Disqualification of Judge puts forth serious and egregious ethics issues raised by Mullarkey’s courtroom behavior, who is charged with being impartial.

Without any further facts or explanation, it would appear that Judge Mullarkey took it upon himself to harass Attorney Baird in the presence of her client due to her prominent and public support of firearms civil rights. In one hearing, Mullarkey checked to make sure the court reporter had stopped recording the proceeding, and then the judge proclaimed from the bench that those who support the Second Amendment should be “ashamed”.

Judge Mullarkey also made mention of ‘The Hidden History of the Second Amendment’ by Professor Carl Bogus, a rabidly anti-gun propaganda piece written by a devoted anti-gun activist. Professor Bogus has been or is currently on the National Advisory Panel for the Violence Policy Center, the Board of Governors for Handgun Control, Inc., and the Board of Directors for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. These are all zealous anti-rights organizations with histories of advocating for bans on firearms.

According to the language and allegations brought forth in Attorney Baird’s Motion, Judge Mullarkey has clearly used his position as a Superior Court Judge in order to act as an activist for anti-rights in defiance of our Constitution and our Second Amendment right to bear arms. The judge’s actions are also in direct defiance of the Supreme Court decisions in DC v Heller. Legal precedent requires that Judge Malarkey is bound to uphold the rulings of the High Court, regardless of his personal advocacy mission. In addition, serious concerns about discrimination and misogyny can be raised from other behaviors that the motion describes regarding Judge Mullarkey’s conduct, whereby he appears to harass Attorney Baird about her gender and background.

Based on the above Motion for Recusal and Dismissal of a Judge, Judge Mullarkey has no place as a judge, nor in holding any position of power, when he is so willing to abuse his position of power to push an anti-civil rights agenda from the bench. Connecticut Carry calls for Judge Mullarkey to immediately step down from the bench and retire.
Judge Mullarkey is not alone in his bias and contempt for our rights. Connecticut Carry is following up on allegations of judges across Connecticut with similar prejudices.

 

Connecticut Carry is a 501(c)(4) non-partisan, grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing and protecting the fundamental civil rights of the men and women of Connecticut to keep and bear arms for defense of themselves and the state as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Constitution of Connecticut.

 

I find it very telling that he made sure the court reporter had stop recording before revealing his disdain for the Bill of Rights.

I wonder if he also thinks those that support the 13th Amendment should be ashamed? Regardless, the punishment should be the same for both. He should be immediately removed from power, all of his previous decisions carefully reviewed, and hounded into hiding by the press.

Quote of the day—Blag Dahlia

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I’m not interested in guns; I was blessed with a big dick. But I understand the impotent pantywaists who need them to fight with. I only wish they would shoot each other instead of those of us who go unarmed, like 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man who earned the enmity of middle-aged Jim Goad for the crime of buying Skittles and getting shot.

Blag Dahlia
July 25, 2013
TRAYVON GOAD—HUNTED LIBERTARIAN!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Plus a bonus wish of injury and death to those who exercise a specific enumerate right.

H/T to reader Brian J. for the email.—Joe]

Support for a friend

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The daughter of a close friend is soon going to Ecuador for a few months. She is participating in “Global Citizen Year”.

I’m not sure how it works but subscribing for email updates on her blog (the link above) is of benefit to her.

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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Their standard operation procedure is to crush dissenting opinion any time they start losing an argument. Having better arguments would seem to equate to brutish behavior for many of them.

Sebastian
July 27, 2013
Where Are the Haters?
[The only minor correction I would have would be to replace the last sentence with “They regard better arguments as brutish behavior.” The qualifiers are not needed. I have not debated with a single one of them that did not regard disagreement, backed up facts and court cases, as being “mean spirited”, “threatening”, hateful, or “angry”. The most gentle wording that I could come up with has been threatened with deletion or just never allowed to appear in the comments of some peoples blog posts.

Such data points should be very telling.—Joe]

Threaded barrel .22s

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Got a gun question: What’s the best and most readily available .22 LR pistol that comes with a threaded barrel as a standard item? It seems like there should be a lot of options, as suppressors and various barrel do-dads become more common, but I don’t see a lot of models out there. The Ruger 22/45 and Ruger Mk III both have that as an option, as does the Sig Mosquito (but I’ve not heard a lot of good things about that one). Any other options I should be looking into?

Quote of the day—Angela Giron

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I had my most successful year this year. I introduced 26 pieces of legislation and 21 of them are now law – – that’s almost a career.

Angela Giron
July 24, 2013
Colorado Firearm Advocates Push Recall in Gun Control
[I find it very telling that she measures success by the number laws introduced and passed into law. That she participated in the infringement of the Second Amendment rights of all the people of Colorado is just confirming her obvious unfitness for public office.

If I were keeping score for her I would measure success by the number of laws she successfully removed from the books.—Joe]

Dependence of the Firearm-Related Homicide Rate on Gun Availability

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I have only scanned the paper Dependence of the Firearm-Related Homicide Rate on Gun Availability: A Mathematical Analysis but I suspect I see several invalid assumptions missed by the 11 people that supposedly did the peer reviews.

  • It appears they only consider cases where the defender shoots and kills the attacker. They don’t include cases where the display of a gun by the defender prevents the attack or is sufficient to stop the attack.
  • It appears they only consider case where the attacker has a gun and do not include attackers that use a different weapon or no weapon.
  • It may be that they include the death of the attacker in the total homicide rate they model and desire the minimization of.
  • The right to keep and bear arms defends against the possibility of a tyrannical government. They do not account for the lives lost in tyrannical government scenarios when the people do not have guns.

Regardless of how the number come out people have a specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. That is not subject to infringement no matter what the model says the homicide rate would benefit from restrictions. Would a projected lower homicide rate be sufficient justification to infringe on the 13th Amendment? The answer is not just “no”, but “HELL NO!” And the same applies to the 2nd Amendment.

Gun cartoon of the day

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H/T to Kris R for the pointer.

From here:

444_left_and_right_comic_139

The joke relies on a fairly significant warping of the language but not so much that it breaks the funny.

Biometric fail

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From here:

Cars of the future may use the driver’s rear end as identity protection, through a system developed at Japan’s Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology. A report surfaced earlier this month that researchers there developed a system that can recognize a person by the backside when the person takes a seat. The system performs a precise measurement of the person’s posterior, its contours and the way the person applies pressure on the seat. The developers say that in lab tests, the system was able to recognize people with 98 percent accuracy.

That’s not good enough. If you can’t drive your car one time out of 50 when the chances of your car being stolen are only once out of, say, ten years you are going to disable the feature.

Also 98% accuracy number was in lab tests. I have to wonder if those lab tests included people having different things in their pockets. If you normally drive with a wallet in your rear pocket and you hop in your car after a day at the beach with your wallet in a bag thrown into the back seat what are the odds then? Or if you change your carry gun, or move the holster a little to one side or the other. And it is going to have to adapt to weight gain and loss over time.

Biometrics have a lot of problems. It’s really tough to get the accuracy needed for everyday use because characteristics of people change. And the basic concept has two fundamental, closely related, security flaws.

One is that your biometric “key” is not well hidden. You leave a set of fingerprints on the glass at the restaurant, on door knobs, and on the keyboard at the library. And image of your iris can be captured with a telephoto lens while you walk down the sidewalk.

The other flaw is that in any secure system you must have a way of repudiating a set of credentials if they have been compromised. How do you repudiate an image of your iris or your fingerprints? At most you only have two eyes and ten fingerprints. And there are lots of gummy bears.

Biometric researchers attempt to block access to these flaws by performing “liveness” tests. The guys in the black hats are keeping up and my guess is, except for some very expensive solutions, they always will.

Quote of the day—WeaponsMan

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Of course, as good economists, we must weigh the benefits against the costs. So let’s add up the benefits. Against the massive inconvenience and waste, the loss of privacy, and the occasional dead traveler, we can weigh:

  • Terrorists caught by TSA: 0.
  • Terror plots stopped by TSA: 0
  • Terrorists inconvenienced by TSA: 0

It’s zeroes all the way down… kind of like their employees. There is no intelligent, good, decent, moral, or ethical person at TSA. Never has been.

WeaponsMan
July 22, 2013
TSA: Evil, but Incompetent
[I probably would give a little bit of a pass on the effectiveness scale. Their job is impossible. It simply isn’t possible to accomplish the goal of deterring terrorists via airport security in a quasi-free society. The money should be spent on something that is achievable.—Joe]

Gun Song- Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix

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Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix was more an idea than a tightly written song. It is one of many Vietnam protest songs of the era. He was a famous and talented guitar player / singer in the 1960s, and he died in 1970, likely from complications from booze and drugs (“aspirating his own vomit”). While well known, he didn’t have anywhere near the production of other well known groups and singers of the time, and most of his albums were actually released posthumously, with only three studio albums and a pair of live albums released before his death. Continue reading →

Probable bug in Windows Phone 8

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I found what appears to be a minor bug in some Windows Phone 8 devices.

It showed up in my Field Ballistics program. I have code that looks like this:

// Can we focus only on the target?
if (this.cam.IsFocusAtPointSupported)
{
    this.cam.FocusAtPoint(0.5, 0.5);
}
else
{
    this.cam.Focus();
}

On someone’s phone this raised a “System.InvalidOperationException” on the call to “FocusAtPoint”.

What appears to have happened is that the phone reports IsFocusAtPointSupported as “true” but doesn’t actually support it. It’s not all that big of deal but it does mean I’ll be releasing an update a little sooner than I had planned.